Newman questioned Peterson on why he refused to go along with the trendy leftist cause du jour: using pronouns chosen by individuals rather than pronouns that describe their biology. “Why should your freedom of speech trump a trans person’s right not to be offended?” Newman asked. Peterson, ever the gentleman, answered the question without guffawing: “Because in order to be able to think, you have to risk being offensive. I mean, look at the conversation we’re having right now. You’re certainly willing to risk offending me in the pursuit of truth. Why should you have the right to do that? It’s been rather uncomfortable.”
Newman misdirected: “Well, I’m very glad I’ve put you on the spot.” But Peterson pursued: “Well, you get my point. You’re doing what you should do, which is digging a bit to see what the hell is going on. And that is what you should do. But you’re exercising your freedom of speech to certainly risk offending me, and that’s fine. More power to you, as far as I’m concerned.”
Newman had no answer. Point to Peterson.
But despite Peterson’s obvious logic, the Left refuses to concede this particular point. Any statement — any statement — must be gauged not only on the basis of its truth-value, according to the Left, but on the basis of whether such truth is likely to offend — or, at least, whether such truth is likely to offend groups the Left perceives as victimized. According to the Left, any and all truth must take a back seat to “your truth,” so long as you claim minority status in any way.
Scott Adams says Newman is suffering from cognitive dissonance
Those more familiar with Social Justice Warrior tactics saw that Newman is just exhibiting two classic SJW traits: They always lie, and they always double down.
Here’s a video that picks up Newman’s tell that she’s about to lie about what Peterson said: “You’re saying…”
Ultimately, does it matter whether Social justice Warriors are lying by intent, or because their viewpoint is so warped that they can no longer perceive the world clearly?
Conor Friedersdorf examines a terrible malady: those who suffer from Social justice Warrior of the ears, a more extreme example of “liberal of hearing.” This example features British journalist Cathy Newman interviewing Jordan B. Peterson, a University of Toronto clinical psychologist. “First, a person says something. Then, another person restates what they purportedly said so as to make it seem as if their view is as offensive, hostile, or absurd.”
Peterson begins the interview by explaining why he tells young men to grow up and take responsibility for getting their lives together and becoming good partners. He notes he isn’t talking exclusively to men, and that he has lots of female fans.
“What’s in it for the women, though?” Newman asks.
“Well, what sort of partner do you want?” Peterson says. “Do you want an overgrown child? Or do you want someone to contend with who is going to help you?”
“So you’re saying,” Newman retorts, “that women have some sort of duty to help fix the crisis of masculinity.” But that’s not what he said. He posited a vested interest, not a duty.
“Women deeply want men who are competent and powerful,” Peterson goes on to assert. “And I don’t mean power in that they can exert tyrannical control over others. That’s not power. That’s just corruption. Power is competence. And why in the world would you not want a competent partner? Well, I know why, actually, you can’t dominate a competent partner. So if you want domination—”
The interviewer interrupts, “So you’re saying women want to dominate, is that what you’re saying?”
The next section of the interview concerns the pay gap between men and women, and whether it is rooted in gender itself or other nondiscriminatory factors:
Newman: … that 9 percent pay gap, that’s a gap between median hourly earnings between men and women. That exists.
Peterson: Yes. But there’s multiple reasons for that. One of them is gender, but that’s not the only reason. If you’re a social scientist worth your salt, you never do a univariate analysis. You say women in aggregate are paid less than men. Okay. Well then we break its down by age; we break it down by occupation; we break it down by interest; we break it down by personality.
Newman: But you’re saying, basically, it doesn’t matter if women aren’t getting to the top, because that’s what is skewing that gender pay gap, isn’t it? You’re saying that’s just a fact of life, women aren’t necessarily going to get to the top.
Peterson: No, I’m not saying it doesn’t matter, either. I’m saying there are multiple reasons for it.
Newman: Yeah, but why should women put up with those reasons?
Peterson: I’m not saying that they should put up with it! I’m saying that the claim that the wage gap between men and women is only due to sex is wrong. And it is wrong. There’s no doubt about that. The multivariate analysis have been done. So let me give you an example––
The interviewer seemed eager to impute to Peterson a belief that a large, extant wage gap between men and women is a “fact of life” that women should just “put up with,” though all those assertions are contrary to his real positions on the matter.
Throughout this next section, the interviewer repeatedly tries to oversimplify Peterson’s view, as if he believes one factor he discusses is all-important, and then she seems to assume that because Peterson believes that given factor helps to explain a pay gap between men and women, he doesn’t support any actions that would bring about a more equal outcome.
This is what Social Justice Warriors in general, and radical feminists in particular, do. They start with the assumption that they’re good, and anyone who objects to their Social Justice Warrior positions is obviously evil, and thus must be made to repent of their heresy or else be destroyed. Any attempt at a more nuanced position that strays from Social Justice Warrior dogma is just a dodge by the evil person meant to obscure their fundamental sexist/racist/Islamophobic/etc. beliefs and avoid repenting of their unwillingness to “check their privilege.” Forget investigating their stated position; that’s just a smokescreen for their evil. They must confess their sins.
Here’s the video of the interview.
Some Twitter reactions:
Jordan Peterson: "DNA exists."
Cathy Newman: "So you're saying you support the forced eugenic sterilization of everyone with an IQ below 130?"
Here we go folks, Cathy Newman got crushed on broadcast TV and they re-framing her being laughed at for it as "Vicious Misogynistic Abuse."
This is how the media will go after Peterson, you can bet your ass they'll try to never allow him on TV again. He destroyed them. pic.twitter.com/k0IppwIJPU
— ☢S.C.R.U.M.P. – Call of Bants (@CheekiScrump) January 20, 2018
Mindlessly spouting SJW talking points doesn't work very well when you're debating someone who has thought the issues through https://t.co/FKsYq1Ja2Z
Having implemented Sharia law, Theocratic Iran is one of the most repressive regimes in the world when it comes to women’s rights, and a wide variety of activities are prohibited to women simply because they are women.
Now that widespread protests have broken out In Iran over the rejection of the Islamic Republic and greater rights for women, you might think that feminists organizations would be in the forefront of those clamoring for greater women’s rights.
You would be wrong. They are, as usual, nattering on about the standard array of far-left causes having nothing to do with women’s rights.
To drill down even further, I thought I would check the Twitter feeds of several prominent feminists. They too are silent on Iran:
Once again, the unwillingness to speak out on Islam’s demonstrable treatment of women as second-class citizens has left American feminists with nothing to say about the most important woman’s rights struggle of the day. (That, and the Democratic Party’s insistence on defending Obama’s disasterous (and unconstitutional) Iran deal.)
Feminism is only about “women’s rights” when they align with a far-left agenda.
Whenever #FeministTwitter freaks out over some pathetically trivial bullshit (read: all the time), Shoe0nHead is there to make fun of them:
TLDW: Feminists freak out over an app that guesses what women look like without makeup, wish death on its creator. Turns out it’s just the test of a concept that will used to combat human trafficking…
Via Prager University comes ex-Google engineer James Damore explaining how when he used science and logic in an internal memo to explain that not all differences in hiring patterns between men and women was the result of sexism. When the internal memo was leaked, Google fired him for his heresy.
Pretty much every Paglia interview is worth reading, and this one right after the death of Hugh Hefner is no exception.
Q: So let me just ask: Was Hugh Hefner a misogynist?
A: Absolutely not! The central theme of my wing of pro-sex feminism is that all celebrations of the sexual human body are positive. Second-wave feminism went off the rails when it was totally unable to deal with erotic imagery, which has been a central feature of the entire history of Western art ever since Greek nudes.
Snip.
I have always taken the position that the men’s magazines — from the glossiest and most sophisticated to the rawest and raunchiest — represent the brute reality of sexuality. Pornography is not a distortion. It is not a sexist twisting of the facts of life but a kind of peephole into the roiling, primitive animal energies that are at the heart of sexual attraction and desire.
Snip.
Gloria Steinem, Susan Faludi, all of those relentlessly ideological feminists are people who have wandered away from traditional religion and made a certain rabid type of feminist rhetoric their religion. And their fanaticism has poisoned the public image of feminism and driven ordinary, mainstream citizens away from feminism. It’s outrageous.
I hugely admired the early role that Steinem played in second-wave feminism because she was very good as a spokesperson in the 1970s. She had a very soothing manner that made it seem perfectly reasonable for people to adopt feminist principles. She normalized the image of feminism when there were a lot of crazy feminists running around (like Valerie Solanas, who shot Andy Warhol). That was Steinem’s great contribution, as far as I’m concerned. Also, I credit her for co-founding Ms. magazine and thereby contributing that very useful word, Ms., to the English language, which allows us to refer to a woman without signaling her marital status. I think that’s a tremendous accomplishment.
But aside from that, Steinem is basically a socialite who always hid her early dependence on men in the social scene in New York. And as a Democrat, I also blame her for having turned feminism into a covert adjunct of the Democratic party. I have always felt that feminism should transcend party politics and be a big tent welcoming women of faith and of all views into it. Also, I hold against Steinem her utter, shameless hypocrisy during the Bill Clinton scandal. After promoting sexual harassment guidelines, which I had also supported since the 1980s, Steinem waved away one of the worst cases of sexual harassment violation that can ever be imagined — the gigantic gap of power between the President of the United States and an intern! All of a sudden, oh, no, it was all fine, it was “private.” What rubbish! That hypocrisy by partisan feminist leaders really destroyed feminism for a long time. So now feminism has rebounded, but unfortunately it’s a particularly virulent brand of feminism that’s way too reminiscent of the MacKinnon-Dworkin sex hysteria of the 1980s.
Playboy magazine founder Hugh Hefner has died at age 91.
Conservatives will decry Hefner for debasing the culture while libertarians will celebrate his role in unleashing the sexual revolution, but neither view is particularly accurate. Pornography predated Playboy by decades, and various cultural and technological forces (not least of which was the widespread adoption of the automobile, ensuring people could decamp to less restrictive environs at will) were always going to bring about the sexual revolution. Hefner was a canny businessman who understood that he could marry nude pictures of women to an upscale lifestyle magazine. The business model worked, and for many years Playboy paid writers some of the top rates in the field.
Those same cultural and technological forces were also going to render Playboy obsolete, as the profit centers in the skin trade quickly moved first to video and then to the Internet.
Today, most attacks on pornography seem to come from the anti-sex feminist left than the religious right.
Hefner lived long enough to see himself transformed into a media icon, and for his flagship magazine to become culturally irrelevant.
The House IT scandal, another UK Islamic rape ring, jihad terror attacks, Charlottesville, Google: Another packed week of news, all big stories that deserve more time than I have to fully untangle. I especially don’t want to get dragged into the endless Charlottesville debate/recrimination/squirrel! morass, since that’s exactly where the leftwing activists and the MSM (but I repeat myself) want us to focus our attention, rather than the economy or Islamic terrorism.
Plus two Disney links, just because that’s the way the week shook out.
The Feds also indicted Awan’s wife, Hina Alvi. “In addition to lying on multiple mortgage disclosures, as an affidavit alleged at the time of Imran’s arrest, the indictment claims Hina lied by claiming medical hardship in order to withdraw hundreds of thousands of dollars from a retirement program.”
McALLEN, Texas — Federal authorities arrested a former chief and current police sergeant for his role in allegedly helping Mexico’s Gulf Cartel move cocaine and marijuana through his jurisdiction. The Texas cop claimed that he needed money to pay for his upcoming bid for county constable after a failed attempt for the Hidalgo County Sheriff position.
Current Progreso Police Sergeant Geovani Hernandez went before U.S. Magistrate Judge Peter Ormsby who formally charged him with one count of possession with intent to distribute cocaine and one count of aiding and abetting the distribution of cocaine.
The case against Hernandez began earlier this year when agents with U.S. Homeland Security Investigations received information from a confidential informant indicating that Sgt. Geovani Hernandez was working for the Gulf Cartel, court records obtained by Breitbart Texas revealed. According to the documents, Hernandez bragged to an informant that he was a friend of former Gulf Cartel leader Juan Manuel “El Toro” Loza Salina and was able to travel to Reynosa without heat. The Texas cop told the informant that he needed money for his upcoming race for Hidalgo County Constable.
Hernandez, like the majority of candidates running for office in the Rio Grande Valley, is a Democrat. The person he lost to in the 2012 Democratic, Guadalupe “Lupe” Trevino, is in prison for money-laundering. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Agreeing with the above version of events: Those well-known Nazi sympathizers, the ACLU:
“I was there and brought concerns directly to the secretary of public safety and the head of the Virginia State Police about the way that the barricades in the park limiting access by the arriving demonstrators and the lack of any physical separation of the protesters and counter-protesters on the street were contributing to the potential of violence,” said Gastanaga. “They did not respond. In fact, law enforcement was standing passively by, seeming to be waiting for violence to take place, so that they would have grounds to declare an emergency, declare an ‘unlawful assembly’ and clear the area.”
“The ridiculous campaign by virtually every media outlet, every Democrat and far too many squishy Republicans to label Trump some kind of racist and Nazi sympathizer is beginning to have the stink of an orchestrated smear. The conflagration in Charlottesville is beginning to feel like a set-up, perhaps weeks or months in the planning.” Also this tidbit I’ve seen elsewhere: “The ‘founder’ of Unite The Right, Jason Kessler, was an activist with Occupy Wall Street and Obama supporter.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
“As for Antifa, it’s a minuscule fringe of the Left, just as its predecessors were,” Noam Chomsky told the Washington Examiner. “It’s a major gift to the Right, including the militant Right, who are exuberant.” Noam Chomsky and I agreeing on something. And the moon became as blood… (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Scott Adams: “How To Know You’re In a Mass Hysteria Bubble”:
A mass hysteria happens when the public gets a wrong idea about something that has strong emotional content and it triggers cognitive dissonance that is often supported by confirmation bias. In other words, people spontaneously hallucinate a whole new (and usually crazy-sounding) reality and believe they see plenty of evidence for it. The Salem Witch Trials are the best-known example of mass hysteria. The McMartin Pre-School case and the Tulip Bulb hysteria are others. The dotcom bubble probably qualifies.
Snip.
One sign of a good mass hysteria is that it sounds bonkers to anyone who is not experiencing it. Imagine your neighbor telling you he thinks the other neighbor is a witch. Or imagine someone saying the local daycare provider is a satanic temple in disguise. Or imagine someone telling you tulip bulbs are more valuable than gold. Crazy stuff.
Compare that to the idea that our president is a Russian puppet. Or that the country accidentally elected a racist who thinks the KKK and Nazis are “fine people.” Crazy stuff.
German town of Bad Nenndorf discovers best way to defeat both Neo-Nazis and Antifa: Have a big party! (Hat tip: Will Shetterly.)
On this Althouse thread I joked that SJWs would soon start digging up the graves of Confederate soldiers to put their bones on trial for war crimes. Guess what?
The hard left is drawing up big plans for November 4. “It’s very likely nothing will come of this, that it’s just another left-wing wish-fulfillment pantomime of a type carried out by leftists every year – if not every six months – since the 60s.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
I was fired by Google this past Monday for a document that I wrote and circulated internally raising questions about cultural taboos and how they cloud our thinking about gender diversity at the company and in the wider tech sector. I suggested that at least some of the male-female disparity in tech could be attributed to biological differences (and, yes, I said that bias against women was a factor too). Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai declared that portions of my statement violated the company’s code of conduct and “cross the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace.”
My 10-page document set out what I considered a reasoned, well-researched, good-faith argument, but as I wrote, the viewpoint I was putting forward is generally suppressed at Google because of the company’s “ideological echo chamber.” My firing neatly confirms that point.
He rejected Google’s internal mythology, and worse, he did so with basic math, in a company where mathiness is supposed to be part of the culture.
He also rejected a piece of the general mythology so firmly that what he said was actively misreported — so blatantly that one has to conclude the reporters either can’t read the hard parts of the memo, didn’t bother to read the memo, or somehow managed to see things that weren’t there. (That last is my guess, based on the examples of Trump Trance we’ve seen over the last six months.)
In the copious hiring I did at Google, 97% of the people I hired were men. I wrote reams of appeals to the hiring committee to make cases for cross-functional candidates who would be great assets to Google, even though a (typically) male dominated software engineering interview crew did not find these candidates up to snuff. I had a 90+% success rate changing the hiring decision for these candidates. Almost every one of these hires made an amazing difference to the company. 98+% of these candidates were men.
It’s not like I wasn’t trying to hire women. But I was working with a candidate pool composed of 90% men. Try software engineers with experience in sensors, wireless and hardware stacks before angrily correcting my stats there. There was no way I was going to come out of that with a larger percentage of women hires than I did.
Yes, there are some unproductive people in major corporations and the media who wish to push their left-leaning political agendas on the public at large.
But we want no part of it.
And you know what? It’s no different here at Slashdot.
We come here to learn about new technologies, about new scientific and mathematical discoveries, and to discuss computing.
We don’t want to waste our days arguing about genitalia, sexual preference, racism, and transgenderism.
We just want this bullshit to end.
We want those on the political left to stop trying to divide society into small groups based on arbitrary traits.
Or at the very least, we want everybody else to ignore the divisions that the political left are trying to create.
Liberals: “There should be fewer regulations on cool things I like!” Everyone else: “What about regulations on things other people like?” Liberals: “Fuck them!”
Ted Nugent believes he would be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame if he weren’t such an outspoken supporter of gun rights. He’s probably right: How do you think is a bigger “Rock and Roll Legend”: Ted Nugent, or ABBA?
In case you’re wondering how big a joke that Southern Poverty Law Center “hate list” is, Bosch Fawstin, a critic of Islam who drew Mohammed and was targeted for assassination in Garland, is evidently a “hate group” all on his own:
.@CNN publishes the Southern Poverty Law Center's list of "hate groups", & me, an individual, is on the NY list :) https://t.co/3xqpP2lfvY
There’s more news on the memo that got Google engineer James Damore fired.
Now that I’ve read it, while I don’t agree with everything, there’s nothing in it that a rational person would regard as “crazy” or a “hate crime.”
Of course, Social justice Warriors are not rational, and there’s plenty in the memo that offends their holy dogma. Like this:
Only facts and reason can shed light on these biases, but when it comes to diversity and inclusion, Google’s left bias has created a politically correct monoculture that maintains its hold by shaming dissenters into silence. This silence removes any checks against encroaching extremist and authoritarian policies. For the rest of this document, I’ll concentrate on the extreme stance that all differences in outcome are due to differential treatment and the authoritarian element that’s required to actually discriminate to create equal representation.
Or this:
“On average, men and women biologically differ in many ways. These differences aren’t just socially constructed.”
Or this:
“We need to stop assuming that gender gaps imply sexism.”
Or this:
The harm of Google’s biases
I strongly believe in gender and racial diversity, and I think we should strive for more. However, to achieve a more equal gender and race representation, Google has created several discriminatory practices:
Programs, mentoring, and classes only for people with a certain gender or race
A high priority queue and special treatment for “diversity” candidates
Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate
Reconsidering any set of people if it’s not “diverse” enough, but not showing that same scrutiny in the reverse direction (clear confirmation bias)
Setting org level OKRs for increased representation which can incentivize illegal discrimination
Or this (from a footnote):
Communism promised to be both morally and economically superior to capitalism, but every attempt became morally corrupt and an economic failure. As it became clear that the working class of the liberal democracies wasn’t going to overthrow their “capitalist oppressors,” the Marxist intellectuals transitioned from class warfare to gender and race politics. The core oppressor-oppressed dynamics remained, but now the oppressor is the “white, straight, cis-gendered patriarchy.”
And from his concluding recommendations:
De-moralize diversity: As soon as we start to moralize an issue, we stop thinking about it in terms of costs and benefits, dismiss anyone that disagrees as immoral, and harshly punish those we see as villains to protect the “victims.”
Stop alienating conservatives.
Viewpoint diversity is arguably the most important type of diversity and political orientation is one of the most fundamental and significant ways in which people view things differently.
In highly progressive environments, conservatives are a minority that feel like they need to stay in the closet to avoid open hostility. We should empower those with different ideologies to be able to express themselves.
Alienating conservatives is both non-inclusive and generally bad business because conservatives tend to be higher in conscientiousness, which is required for much of the drudgery and maintenance work characteristic of a mature company.
Also this: “Microaggression training incorrectly and dangerously equates speech with violence and isn’t backed by evidence.”
Be nice to conservatives? Speech isn’t violence? For Social Justice Warriors that’s like someone in Saudi Arabia declaring that Mohammed is not the prophet of God. No wonder they had to purge him for his heresy.
The Damore affair proves yet again that no matter how many ritual nods towards liberalism and diversity you make, the moment you go against their sacred dogma, all the good intentions and prior good works in the world won’t save you from a ritual witch burning.
Now comes word that Damore intends to file a lawsuit against Google. “He filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board before publishing his memo, and the NLRB protects people against firing once they’ve lodged a complaint.” I’m sure an Obama Administration NLRB would be only too happy to bury that lawsuit. But a Trump Administration NLRB is an entirely different kettle of fish. Stay tuned…
